Need for Speed Payback shows cars punching cars

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EA have blasted the first “gameplay trailer” for Need For Speed Payback [official site] during their E3 announce-o-rama, showing a cut-down mission of cars battering cars so they can beat up a truck and steal another car from its belly. It’s fast and furious but, sadly, has no Jason Statham. Have a peek:

If this is actually part of the game rather than a demo bit, it’ll be heavily cut-down and jazzed-up for E3 trailer purposes. Driving for ten seconds between cutscenes wouldn’t be the greatest fun. And I’m guessing those supposedly tough cars won’t take themselves out in two seconds.

But voila, that’s the sort of fast and furious crimecar action Ghost Games are shooting for. The story campaign is about three folks coming together to take down the crime bosses of The House. It’ll have plenty of regular races and other bits too, mind.

Need for Speed Payback is coming via Origin on November 10th, priced at £54.99.

I hope they tone it down so it’s not every single takedown, as that hurt the flow of previous games. Give me one out of every four, or only show it for crashes where there’s over 720 degrees of rotation or 50G impacts, otherwise just give me a little “skull-in-wheel” icon or play a sound cue.

It’s kind of incredible how Fast and Furious become immensely succesful by basically being Need for Speed: The Movie, and the NFS franchise is being run into the ground by trying to be Fast and Furious: The Game.

I expect it’s an experiment to see if it attracts new players into the genre. If it doesn’t work, it’ll disappear.

I’m the sort of player that plays most games for their single player aspects then uninstalls, so this would potentially be the sort of hook that would work on me except I don’t care about sports. It does seem a rather odd fit with any game where the goal is generally to get from being the worst team to the best. That’s enough of a ‘single player mode’ and the story writes itself.